Here are some quotes that I've collected. Some are humorous, some thought-provoking.
There is no fool like an old fool, except maybe a young fool. But the young fool has to first grow up to realize what a damn fool he was when he was a young fool." -- Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Great Britain from 1957 to 1963.
People who live in glass houses don?t have much of a sex life. -- Tom Besl.
Those who cannot remember the past spend a lot of time looking for their cars in mall parking lots. -- Jay Trachman.
A soft answer turneth away wrath -- but not telephone sales people. -- Harold Emery
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars-- mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my eye can catch one-million-year-old light. It does no harm to the mystery to know a little about it. -- Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Pride comes from an achievement that does not depend on others? approval. It is the hard-earned approval we grant ourselves. It prods us to distance ourselves from the herd. Today, however, the word has been so debased that it is used to describe people whose only distinction is that they are part of the herd. People claim they are "proud" because they are gay, black, female, white, whatever, all of which are accidents of nature. Real pride makes us distinctive, even if only in our mind?s eye. -- Pat Jordan.
"Me? Argumentative and pretentious? Au contraire!" -- Hoest
If at first you don?t succeed, take the tax loss. -- Kirk Kirkpatrick
A fool and his money get a lot of publicity. -- Al Bernstein
We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts. -- Harold Nicolson
What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin. -- Mark Twain.
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it. -- Henry Ford
One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you. -- Dennis a Peer.
Up to a point a man?s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; taht I will be tomorrow." -- Louis L?Amour, The Walking Drum.
Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It?s etermally mysterious. -- Van Cliburn.
Smart people spend time alone. They don?t fill their days with appointments from 8am to 10 pm, as many politicians and executives do. Great science does not emerge from hard logic and grinding hours. It comes from the mysterious resources of the human brain and soul. Inspiration is nurtured by activities like chopping wood and raking leaves, preparing dinner and reading to the kids. These activities soften the rigid pace of the day?s pursuits and allow all our God-given intuition to work its unlogical magic. Only then can we reach our fullest potential. Only then can we leap from thinking to understanding. -- Philip K. Howard.
The best upbringing that children can receive is to observe their parents taking excellent care of themselves -- mind, body, spirit. Chlidren, being the world?s greatest mimics, naturally and automatically model their parents? behavior. -- Dr. Benjamin Spock.
There is nothing more influential in a child?s life than the moral power of quiet example. For children to take morality seriously they must see adults take morality seriously -- William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues.
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy -- the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men. A weird life it is to be living always in somebody else?s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could become real. -- Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced -- and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load. -- Thomas Sowell, Forbes
If something is not worth doing at all, it?s not worth doing well. -- Warren Buffett
It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly. -- Isaac Asimov, Foundation.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. -- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
While an original is always hard to find, his is easy to recognize. -- John L. Mason, An Enemy Called Average
The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart. -- Mencius
My father always told me, "Find a job you love and you?ll never have to work a day in your life." -- Jim Fox.
There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles -- famine, disease and such-like -- and some folks are born with money, some with none. In the end it is up to the man what he becomes, and none of those other things matters. It is character that counts. -- Louis L?Amour, Chancy
What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneness, and say, "This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned -- and you with it, dust of the dust!" Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, "Never have I heard anything more divine"? -- Friedrich Nietzsche
When you teach your son, you teach your son?s son. -- Talmud
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. -- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Once, America?s minorities knew what they wanted: equality of opportunity, an end to discrimination, fairness of the sort any reasonable person could understand. Today it?s not so clear. The current empnasis is less on individual opportunity than on group outcomes. | In the old days even bigots knew what we were talking about when we railed against discrimination that denied jobs to qualified minority candidates. But the white majority cannot see itself in many of our present demands: the right to a special black wing in the university dormitory, to racially proportionate hiring, to outcomes based on group membership rather than on individual merit. They wonder how we can demand these things for ourselves while condemning them for segregation, quotas and other devices to enshrine white privileges. | Our argument gives the case away: since race-based discrimination has favored whites in the past, justice demands pro-black unfairness now. This is an argument less for rooting out unfairness than for equalizing it, less for catching up than getting even. -- William Raspberry.
A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can?t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war. Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for. -- Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hillthop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse. -- Hellen Keller, My Religion.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area -- crime, education, housing, race relations -- the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them. -- Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?
The word "no" carries a lot more meaning when spoken by a parent who also knows how to say yes. -- Joyce Manard in Parenting.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile -- hoping it will eat him last. -- Winston Churchill
Children have more need of models than of critics. -- Carolyn Coats, Things your Dad Always Told You But You Didn?t Want to Hear.
Lots of people have asked me what Gracie and I did to make our marriage work. It?s simple -- we didn?t do anything. I think the trouble with a lot of people is that they work to hard at staying married. They make a business out of it. When you work too hard at a business you get tired; and when you get tired you get grouchy; and when you get grouchy you start fighting; and when you start fighting you?re out of business. -- George Burns, Living it up.
The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popular emothions. It is the legitimation of envy, of all the deadly sins the one which a stable society based on consensus should fear the most. The monster state is a source of many evils; but it is, above all, an engine of envy. -- Paul Johnson, The Recovery of Freedom.
The words "penalty", "restrict", and "violate" appeared more times in President Clinton?s health care bill than in his crime bill. -- Malcom S. Forbes, Jr., Forbes.
We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we had ever invented -- human liberty. -- Mark Twain.
Everything comes to he who hustles while he waits. -- Thomas A. Edison
There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves. -- Tom Clancy, Without Remorse.
There are no limits on our future if we don?t put limits on our people. -- Jack Kemp
The two words "information" and "communication" are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through. -- Sydney J. Harris
You cannot get ahead while you?re getting even. -- Rep. Dick Armey
Wisdom doesn?t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself. -- Tom Wilson
History is a better guide than good intentions. -- Jeane Kirkpatrick
An optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds. A pessimist fears the same may be true. -- Doug Larson